Broadcasting Green

Grassroots Environmentalism on Muslim Women's Radio

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3348923
AutoresDaniel Nilsson Dehanas (0000-0001-9240-7075, autor de correspondencia)
Año2009
Volumen57
Número2_suppl
Páginas141-155
Fecha de publicación2009-10-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThe Sociological Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0038-0261 • E-ISSN: 1467-954X
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1111/j.1467-954x.2010.01890.x
OpenAlexW1532570064
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas9
Referencias citadas12

In 1967, Lynn White published a wide-ranging essay in Science arguing that the \ncauses of the world’s ecological crises are, at their roots, spiritual. He wrote that \nAbrahamic thought has always been profoundly anthropocentric, beginning \nwith the creation account in Genesis in which God gives humanity full dominion \nover the earth and over animals. According to White, Western Christianity and \nrelated traditions, such as Islam, have seen nature as instrumental to human \nneeds. These branches of thought have therefore justified the exploitation of \nnature. White concluded that ‘[s]ince the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, \nthe remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not’. \nUsing St. Francis of Assisi as a model, White called for a re-envisioning of the \nmodern human relationship with nature that reached to the depth of the soul. \nThough perhaps not quite what White had in mind, a religious reshaping of \nenvironmental ethics is at work in the West within some of its Muslim communities. \nIn this paper I will investigate the particular case of the Muslim Community \nRadio (MCR, 87.8 FM) environmental broadcasting campaign in the \nEast End of London during Autumn 2007. The radio campaign is an instance \nof a small but significant set of Muslim environmental collective action campaigns \nemerging in Britain. I focus the paper on the women’s radio programming \nduring the MCR radio campaign. I argue that the women’s radio \nbroadcasts were intended to ‘sacralize’ environmentalism in the minds of the \nfemale Muslim listening audience, imbuing environmental ethics with religious \nmeaning. Though the primary overt discourse in the campaign was this sacralized \nenvironmentalism, I will also point out two underlying discourses: 1) The \nassertion that Islam is modern and compatible with selected western values and \n2) the call for Muslim women to take up a carefully gender-structured community \nactivism. Therefore, the radio campaign was in reality three simultaneous \ncampaigns: for environmental activism, for the justification of Islam in modern \nBritain, and, in a more veiled form, for women’s empowerment. These interconnected \nlayers of meaning reveal something of the complexity of concerns within \nMuslim communities in Britain. As I will argue in the conclusion, the case also \ncontributes to our general understanding of religious influences on environmental \nbehaviours and of the agentic role of women in sacralization processes in \nthe modern West (Aune, Sharma and Vincett, 2008)

Anthropocentrism · Christianity · Dominion · Environmental ethics · Environmentalism · Grassroots · Humanity · Islam · Political science · Sociology · Theology · White (mutation) · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Environmental Philosophy and Ethics · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy · Religion, Ecology, and Ethics · Religious studies